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Early life and education

Karpelès was born in Chenôve, France in 1985, the child of Anne Karpelès, a geologist.[5] He was raised in Dijon.[5][6] Between 1995 and 2000, Karpelès was educated at Collège Prieuré de Binson in Châtillon-sur-Marne and Prieuré De Binson in Dormans.[3] He then spent one year at Lycée Claude Bernard in Paris, before completing his education in 2003 at Lycée Louis Armand in Paris.[3]

According to Jason Mick of Dailytech, Karpelès was found guilty of a financial computer crime and of money transfer fraud when he was a teenager. The court apparently gave him a 3 month suspended sentence and no criminal record.[6] This was later confirmed by Ashley Barr, a former Mt. Gox employee.[7]

Career

According to Karpelès' LinkedIn page, he worked from 2003 to 2005 at Linux Cyberjoueurs as a software developer and network administrator.[10] Karpelès is a PHP developer, and has contributed to the language's official repository of extensions with proctitle,[11] which allows the name of the current process to be changed on Linux systems.

According to a joint report by Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica and Pierre Alonso of Le Monde, Karpelès was found guilty of fraud when he was tried in absentia in France in 2010. He also admitted to having "pirated" a server to French authorities. He was sentenced to a year in jail but has not yet served his sentence.[17][18]

Ross Ulbricht, while on trial for operating the undercover Silk Road marketplace, claimed that the pseudonymous "Dread Pirate Roberts" behind Silk Road was not him but Mark Karpelès.[19] Karpelès publicly denied the claim on Twitter,[20] and Ulbricht was eventually found guilty.[21]

Bitcoin Wiki

In 2010, Karpelès reopened the Bitcoin Wiki with MediaWiki. Karpelès's MediaWiki and Martti Malmi's dokuwiki sites coexisted briefly before it was evident that the community preferred MediaWiki.[22] All pages on the dokuwiki instance were copied to the MediaWiki one in 2010 and in 2015 the a project to import the complete history of those pages began.[23]

Karpelès also created CryptoPayment, a MediaWiki extension that was used by the Bitcoin Wiki for several years. The extension granted editing rights to users who paid a small anti-spam fee.[citation needed]

Shortly after reopening the Bitcoin Wiki, Karpelès added a Bitcoin Map tool to it.[24] The map plotted nodes geographically[24] and a still of it was featured on the Main Page for years.

References

↑ 1.01.1Template:Cite document The document, signed by "Robert Marie Mark Karpeles", was published by Ars Technica on the Scribd website, and according to Ars Technica is a court document filed in US Bankruptcy Court.